WHEN the Teignmouth dual carriageway was opened in March 1976, a lot of local people did not think it was worth the £1 million cost.

The 300-yard long road was designed to allow through traffic to bypass the main shopping area.

Critics pointed out it ripped through one of the oldest parts of the town, destroying its charm and character for ever.

A report at the time declared: A medieval settlement has probably been concreted for all time.

Archaeologists predicted finds of national importance on the site, but plans for a dig before the road was built had to be abandoned when the local authority turned down a request for a £3,000 grant.

Scores of people faced great upheaval when dozens of shops, homes and offices were demolished to make way for the road. Many people bitterly claimed they were not given adequate compensation.

Some will never forgive the road because it led to the destruction of three popular pubs – the Prince of Wales, the Sebastapol, and the Railway Hotel.

The road has virtually cut the town in two, and for many pedestrians a trip to the shops means a long detour through subways.

A car park has been built on one side of the dual carriageway, but people coming into the town from the Exeter and Torbay directions will have to go on a roundabout route to get into it.

As one local councillor put it: ‘The road leads from nowhere to nowhere.’

At either end of the road are narrow bottlenecks. The Dawlish road is so narrow that at one point two buses or heavy vehicles cannot pass each other.

Plans to extend the dual carriageway further along Bitton Park Road and up over the cliffs towards Dawlish have now all but been abandoned because of the economic crisis.

Hardly anyone in the town has a good word to say for the super highway, and it has been described as a ‘monstrosity’, a ‘waste of money’, and the ‘rape of Teignmouth’.

The long construction period of the road had an unhappy history, and completion was months overdue.

The contractors seemed to encounter all sorts of snags, and the upheaval caused a great deal of inconvenience for shopkeepers and residents in the area.

The host of oil drums and other debris littering the site prompted the mayor, Cllr Ted Card, to describe it as an ‘eyesore’.

Admittedly the by-pass will take a lot of traffic away from the town centre, especially in the summer months when the roads become clogged up.

There has always been a bypass up the widened Exeter Road and along New Road to the Dawlish Road. What Teignmouth is desperately short of is parking spaces, and many believe the money could have been been better spent on more car parks.

One of the most outspoken critics of the road is Cllr Arthur Bladon, who feels it is now irrelevant to the needs of the town

‘The road was forced on us by the Minister but the county council has changed the plan so much that it now no longer resembles the original scheme.  The affair of the car park on the site of the old Brook Hill school is a scandal.

‘People coming from the west will see it on the other side of the road, but to get to it will have to drive half a mile around a circuit. For strangers it will be like trying to find the the centre of maze at Hampton Court.

‘The planners have known about this problem for months, yet they seem determined to make sure people do not get into the car park. Instead of trying to solve it, they spend money on planting out pretty flower beds.’

The controversy over the new road will no doubt rage on for some time. They may not love it, but from now the people of Teignmouth will have to learn to live with it.